A wise boss once lamented what he called the death of apprenticeship. As organizations downsized, the paths to management were compressed, and people found themselves making decisions that they would have previously waited a decade or two to make.
Where a generation before, a marketing decision-maker would approach those decisions having spent many years working under other decision-makers and learning from them, today, it’s not at all unusual for people fresh out of college to find themselves in control of what companies do. Of course, most leave school with more focused education than in days past, but there’s still a lot to be said for experience.